Mmm, the clock just clicked over to a Monday. Ho-hum. I've been doing pretty well against my g4m3r-g33k brother in "Agent Under Fire", rented for his GameCube. Heh. He still kicks my butt, of course, with slashed health and no auto-aim (I worked my way up to Advanced but refuse to relinquish totally). I have fun doing marginally better than the AI bots though. Wheee.
My head is spinning with creative muck. It's -- hmm. There's a term I've heard on Bill Nye, describing the goop life was initially formed from as being a kind of proto-somethingorother soup. That's the kind of goo floating about my brain just now. It's stuff that could be groovy ideas, under the right conditions, but none of it is really formed enough to be called "ideas" yet.
I've been reading this neato webcomic called "Zebra Girl" and it got my brain buzzing. The idea behind many a webcomic is that we are all outcast in some way. We all have things that set us apart from everyone else, and that we think of as being bad. It's ... interesting. Give the comic a try; it starts of a little forced and overly light-hearted, but it gets into a super dramatic arc later. Wowza.
I cannot think properly with Ace of Base on my WinAmp. I've got to delete that. Just a sec.
I refuse to think that I am all that much like other people. I have a thousand a little details that make me different from every single person to ever inhabit this planet. I am the only baby girl of my full name born on my hometown hospital at 6:33pm on that special Tuesday in 1981 and that is never going to change.
Obviously, people like to put people into boxes. I think counselors in particular tend to do this, because of their training. Psychiatry (holy hell, I spelled that right on the first try?!) is a branch of medicine, which is in turn a kind of science, and science dictates that certain things are always true. Science is flawed when it is used on people, because we have far too many unseen factors for science to ever properly understand us. We may understand less complicated species, perhaps, and maybe some highly advanced species would be able to develop a type of science capable of untangling our messy minds, but I think we ourselves never will.
I rather like my brain messy. Don't clean the gutter; I'll only block it again. *snickers*
It bugs me to be placed in a box because of things like my depression. Anything that doesn't fit some imaginary norm must be a flaw. Grr.
My mom asked me today if my father had ever abused me sexually. (For those of you just tuning in, my parents divorced in '99 after she learned that he was sleeping with 55-year-old bank teller named Barb.) She's asked me that a couple times over the course of my life and she always gets the same answer. No. He's hit me, and he's hit my brothers. Mom knew about this, witnessed it sometimes, but never did anything to stop it. She's my mama and I love her anyway. The abuse was highly irregular, just a few times over many years, and ended as each of my father's kids grew big enough to possibly fight back.
I've been... exploring... lately. I really don't know how else to put it. Trying to figure stuff out about myself, about the people around me a little bit. Wondering about my place in the universe and all that crap.
I think my mom is worried about me. Because I'm not interested in dating. Why would I be? I'm quite happy remaining a virgin, and there are precious few boys around my area who would date me without wanting to "get some" in the bargain. I rather doubt there are any who would meet my somewhat lofty standards. I don't always like being so picky about the people I let into my life, but it seems that every time I make an exception (and many times when I think my judgement is dead on), I end up getting hurt. People leaving seems to wound me much more deeply than it hurts other people, and I feel I must take measures to protect myself from that pain. I'm not a brittle human being, but I am fragile and I don't want to shatter under a particularly brutal assault on my emotions.
And listen to me babble! Heh. Me being a little groggy but not particularly sleepy is apparently good for diarizing. Or not. I'll have to read this all later and see if it's crap or not.
I suppose I should not go around telling someone else's story, as it were, but this concerns me peripherally. A -- a friend of mine, whom I don't think I should name here, is having a -- a relationship. *groans*
Restart! Okay. My friend is carrying on with a married man. His marriage is not happy and I believe the couple is in the process of divorcing. They have one wee one together and he has two more, each child with a different mother. He has been in prison -- I don't know for what crime, which has me madly curious and wondering if I haven't been told because it's something particularly nasty, but of course he wouldn't be out so young if that were the case. (I hope.)
So. My wonderful friend got kicked out of her mom's house and moved in with this fellow sometime around the time she wound up sleeping with him at least once. She is currently living in this fellow's house, along with the man's wife and child.
Am I the only one who thinks this situation is cracked?! Help me out here!
Oh, she's looking for a place. With him. Yeah, the as-yet still married dude. Because his job pays peanuts (ohhh, what a prize this chap is, I mean really) and she wants to take care of him. So do I, but I think I'd rather "take care" of him with a chainsaw. *silently fumes*
I do not know what to make of this girl. I really don't. When I met her, we were both in high school and I found out she liked the same Christian alt-rock band that I did, and that the church she attended (somewhat sporadically, as I later learned) was quite near to mine in beliefs and, well, dogma.
Then, she's bi. And has a girlfriend. Who is now living with a guy who used to hit on me and my friend. *sweatdrop* My life is so fucked up.
After that, the married guy. She thought it was funny that her co-workers thought she was sleeping with him. That was before she DID sleep with him. I don't think she saw the humour in it after that. I did, just a little... but then I'm a twisted bitch, or so I've been told.
My mom is still back on "But I thought she liked girls?" Aw, poor mom. All this alt-lifestyle stuff is messing with her conservative head. My mom is an actual teacher of Sunday School and a member of our church consistory. (Of course, my dad was a church deacon and then elder before resigning. It was another consistory member who first spotted daddykins with his twice-divorced overripe peach of a pussy.)
Ooh, burned much? Yes thanks. *fumes mutely*
I shouldn't even tell this next part because I'm afraid that the normally open-minded and accepting DiaryLand community will eat me alive for admitting how conservative and Republican I really am. In the interest of completeness, I guess...
My friend. The one I told y'all about just a bit ago? Yeah. She's on birth control, thankfully. I asked her about it. She hates taking pills, but I figured she was too smart to not be doing something for birth control, so I asked out of curiousity. A shot, she said. Well and good.
That is the point at which I should have shut my great ugly maw and sipped my soda in peace, but I didn't.
I asked her what she'd do if she got pregnant. I was still trying to pretend that I actually knew her, instead of just the increasingly obscuring mask she seems to wear. I was expecting her to say she'd give it up for adoption or something. I don't know what I was expecting, really, but I was wanting her to say something along those lines, and that isn't what she said.
She said she'd get an abortion. She said it casually, like it was no big deal at all, like it wasn't even surgery but a simple brushing off of unwanted lint.
(And my playlist came up on Ben Folds Five, "Brick". Of all the Ben Folds Five songs I have it had to come up on "Brick". I'm gonna friggin' cry, I just know it. Moving on.)
And I asked her more. I told her how my aunt and uncle, a wonderful couple who deserve to have kids more than I probably ever will, are trying to have kids. In vitro isn't working. They've been saving for years to adopt a sibling group from Russia. From fucking Russia. Because here in America, we get our children surgically removed and incinerated before they're big enough to occupy orphanage beds.
I tell her. I say that I thought it was odd that girls or young women would pay money to get an abortion, when they could carry the child to term and get paid for it.
She snorts just a little, rather attractively. She's learned to woo her married man, I think to myself, but I know better than to voice the thought just then. She says prenatal visits and hospital delivery are expensive. She says you wouldn't get paid for that.
I ask her if it's all about the money then. If allowing life to fully form is too fiscally complicated.
She says yeah. That, and that she's lazy. She says it with an air of finality that I don't dare breach.
I brought it up to my mother the next day. She sighed, as I knew she would. There's something very comforting about voicing your opinion on an issue to someone whom you know feels the same way. I told mom about the cost thing.
Mom said to me, with a slightly pained voice, that she knows that my aunt and uncle would pay all the prenatal visits, and the hospital bill for delivery, and anything else at all. They just want a child. It's not fair that they should have to save money to fly to Russia just to have a family, when there are young females all around who are perfectly willing to throw those fetuses away. If there was a way to take them and transplant those unborn children into my aunt's barren womb, I know that she would. I know it. My uncle wants children of his own blood so badly, and that's something that he isn't allowed to have. And it's something that is thrown away every day.
Life isn't fair, I know.
It's just painful to realize that if someone I love so deeply had the chance to ease the hurt of someone else I love very much, she wouldn't do it. Because it's inconvenient. Even though I'm not asking for myself, or perhaps because I'm not, it's too much to ask. To let life live.
Much as I'd like to close this entry here, I suppose it's only fair to my readers to mention my own two cents. See, I didn't hit puberty until I was 15. I was perhaps the very last girl in my high school class to menstruate. I've always had gender/sex issues (I was practically born with them; my dad wanted me to be a boy to replace the son he lost almost the same day I was conceived; I always felt I was too masculine) and by the time I was 15 and still flat as a board, I was deathly afraid that I would be infertile.
I want children of my own someday. I want it very much. I want a daughter to name after my late maternal grandmother, whom I barely remember. I want a son so I can show him that a girl like mom knows a little about guy things, and isn't afraid to pick up a muddy toad bare-handed.
Hell, it's still possible that I might not be able to bear children. I bleed, but that doesn't mean everything. (I have many times yelled at God and informed Him that in my lowly opinion, if I have to suffer the pains and bothers of the female reproductive system, I should at least be able use said system. I have not yet heard back from Him on this crucial matter.) I've never had a Pap smear or any other exam of the sort. Never seen any ob/gyn. Afraid of the stirrups mostly. Remember how I have sex issues? Um. Yes. People poking around, down there, would freak me out. BAD-LY.
So there still exists the possibility that I will not be able to have my own children. And my buddy with the married SO is of the opinion that such a fluke of nature would mean that I should have to save an ungodly sum of money and fly to Russia or China or someplace and adopt kids who maybe even are of a different race. Every time an outsider would see me with my kids, he or she would think that they were someone else's children... *shakes and tries not to cry*
I'm still trying to figure out how she can like some of that Christian alt-rock band's songs and not see them for what they are. What part of truth and consequences slips through the cracks? What part?
I just don't know.
But hey, in other news, these new Baked Doritios are rockin'. Love them. But if that's supposed to be a silver lining for the day, then Fate cheated and used tin plating instead. Maybe tomorrow, when it's no longer a Monday.